Not Quite A Victory
by The Amazing Snorkack
Summary: Harry has gained a strange psychic power, and Hermione and Ron race to stop him from cataclysmically killing himself, in the 'delusion' that everything could return to the way it was.
1. Prologue

*~Not Quite A Victory~*

Hello there, everyone! This is The Amazing Snorkack, here with what so far will be a preview of a fanfic on FictionAlley.org I am currently making… but I haven't abandoned Second War! The chapter will be up sooner than soon. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the blood, angst, killing, and swearing that makes this fic my favorite of all the ones I've done… although this is only the prologue. More Evil!Harry later… on FictionAlley, or if ya'll like it I can put it up on FF.net at the same time. And the title might change between websites, or on both.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

**~ Prologue ~**   
  
  
  
"Look out!" someone screamed in terror.   
  


  
The Great Hall erupted with screams and explosions of fiery light. The doors seemed to be sealed shut by a magical locking spell which burned people's hands if they attempted to escape. The masses of students panicked and crowded around the walls as a dark whirlwind consumed the centre of the room.   
  


  
The Dark Lord had arrived.   
  


  
At least two dozen cloaked and masked Death eaters appeared from the massive tornado, magically binding and gagging the students, and attacking those who fought back with painful Dark Magic's. Much of the shouting was cut short as more and more of the students were tied up or knocked out.   
  


  
Voldemort stepped out of the windstorm almost casually, not even glancing at the dealt-with students. His slitted red eyes had transformed back into the icy blue colour they had originally been, his skin became less pale, and his nose had reappeared. Little by little, the humanity had returned to the greatest evil of the wizarding world, by the flesh, blood, and bone of his revival potion. Once again, he was Tom Riddle.   
  


  
"Dumbledore, what a surprise to find you here," Voldemort said sarcastically.   
  


  
The old Headmaster had risen from his chair. The staff drew their wands threateningly, looking over at the students with concern. With a slashing of his wand, Voldemort had snapped the wands of every teacher clean in two.   
  


  
"There is nothing here for you, Tom," Dumbledore uttered. He laid both pieces of his wand on the table in front of him and continued to stare at the Dark Lord with both coldness and hostility. "No one stands in your way now but me."   
  


  
Several muffled screams and gasps came from the students bound with magical ropes and gags.   
  


  
"You are becoming soft in the head, old fool," scoffed Voldemort. "Harry Potter is most certainly alive within the protection of these walls; I can feel him coming closer to us as we speak. Now, if you will excuse me, I will simply rid myself of yet another annoyance. . .you."   
  


  
He raised his wand slowly, savouring the moment. Dumbledore made no move to stop him from the inevitable. "I suggest you do not do this, Tom," Dumbledore advised.   
  


  
Voldemort gritted his teeth and growled. "_Avada Kedavra!_"   
  


  
The doors of the Great Hall ripped off their hinges and collapsed onto several Death Eaters who had been biding their time in front of them.   
  


  
The sound of Albus Dumbledore's lifeless body hitting the floor, and the cries of the staff as they looked on were swallowed up by the echoing bang of the doors. Harry Potter was framed in front of them, his expression of malevolence obscured by flickering torches. He twirled a wand between his fingers that was evidently not his own.   
  


  
"Leave now, Tom Riddle. Or die."   
  


  
The Dark Lord cackled. "You think one of your pathetic threats will scare me off? I think I can force you to give me the Green Flame Torch here and now without so much as an Imperius Curse on you."   
  


  
"I said leave!" Harry stopped twirling the wand, so everyone could see what it looked like. It was carved with a ruby-eyed and emerald-eyed snake interweaving with each other up to the tip, which was both snake's heads pressed against each other, pointing up. It almost screamed Dark Magic Artifact. It began to change shape, forming a snake-entwined torch burning with an unnaturally green flame that reflected Harry's eye colour.   
  


  
Several gagged students appeared at Voldemort's feet, kicking and trying to escape. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Luna, writhing in their bonds. Voldemort leaned over Hermione first, his wand scraping across her neck like a knife.   
  


  
"Bring me the Torch, or they each die in turn. Mudblood first, of course."   
  


  
He saw Hermione's eyes widen as she shook her head. He knew they would die for him, but he couldn't let them get killed. Especially not. . . . especially not Luna. She was his girlfriend now, the only person he in which could confide his deepest secrets and fears. Without her, he was sure he would fall apart.   
  


  
Every step Harry took echoed off the stone walls. The entire time his scar was burning to the point of making his eyes water. He felt unaware of the many eyes following him; only his four friends there mattered for the moment.   
  


  
He held out the torch, which had shrunk back into the intricate wand again. End first, of course. "Free everyone in this room, or you lose and I'll snap the Torch in half before you can kill me."   
  


  
"As you wish." The ropes and gags that bound every one of the students vanished. Most of them hurried out of the room and to the illusory safety of their Common Rooms. Luna, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione hurried away in different directions, massaging their wrists and mouthing "no" at Harry silently. He shook his head slightly. They all regrouped behind him.   
  


  
"Harry, don't do this," Luna whispered in his ear. Her large hoop earrings jangled as she moved next to his shoulder.   
  


  
"I have a plan. Trust me," he reassured her quietly.   
  


  
"Potter, give me the Torch."   
  


  
"Sure," he breathed. He sauntered over to the centre of the room. Voldemort extended a long-fingered hand. Harry's eyes darted back and forth nervously as he held out the Torch. He kept his expression very calm and made sure that not even one muscle tensed, so he did not ruin the surprise of his next move.   
  


  
Just as Voldemort wrapped his hand around the weapon, his groin was met by Harry's spike-bottomed Quidditch cleat. He doubled over, while Harry pulled the Torch neatly out of his grasp.   
  


  
"I always knew keeping a straight face would come in handy," Harry grinned. "Now, Tom, how about you and I duel? Winner takes all."   
  


  
"You'll curse the day you were born when I'm through with you!" Voldemort hissed. "_Malonocturno!_"   
  


  
For a second, Harry didn't know what hit him.   
  


  
Then he realized that Voldemort had successfully landed a blinding and deafening curse on him. He easily cancelled it out with the magical powers of the Green Flame Torch, ducking as he watched a fatal green jet of light whip over his hair as his senses returned.   
  


  
"_Petrificus Arborum!_" Hundreds of roots and vines shot up from between the cracks in the stone floor, rendering Voldemort temporarily helpless. His arms and legs had been entwined by the plants, until he cut himself loose with a knife spell. The vegetation withered and died almost as quickly as it had been summoned.   
  


  
Voldemort and Harry were now edging around in a very wide circle, watching, waiting for the other's move.   
  


  
Harry made the deadly mistake of looking away from Voldemort, just for a second. He caught a glimpse of Luna and the others looking on fearfully, his last true and definitely real memory.   
  


  
"_No. . . look out!_" his instincts screamed.   
  


  
"_Crucio!_" Voldemort cried triumphantly. He was right on target.   
  


  
"AUUUUGGHHH!!!"   
  


  
Harry couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't breathe. Every inch of his body was afire with the most excruciating pain imaginable, if there was such an imagination to conceive it. He knew he should be bleeding by now. He could almost sense that his blood vessels would burst, and white-hot needles were burrowing themselves deep into his skin to draw the scarlet substance. And yet no blood came.   
  


  
A horrible sense of calm suddenly dawned on him amid the agony. His pain-clogged senses returned with screaming filling his ringing ears and blood rolling in dark droplets down his lower lip. His upper canine teeth had ripped the skin of his lips open as they bit straight down. He lay convulsing on his side, eyes wide in confusion.   
  


  
His left eye began twitching. A tic. He felt bruised all over now, mostly because he'd been rolling around during the curse across scuffed stone floors. He was thankful there wasn't any more punctured skin, although moments ago he had been perfectly convinced there was blood gushing from all parts of him. Odd.   
  


  
He clambered to his feet, slowly, showing no signs of weakness. He felt in control again, the same way he hadn't when the curse was over. How long was he under it? Ten, maybe fifteen seconds? That just didn't seem right.   
  


  
He glanced at his friends again. Hermione was crying onto Ron's shoulder, while he tried to comfort her. Luna and Ginny were both making horrified faces in his direction. Had he died and become a ghost? He looked and felt pretty solid, but maybe it was different when you were the ghost.   
  


  
_Where's Voldemort? __  
  
_

  
Harry tightened his fist around nothing.   
  


  
_Where's the Torch!? __  
  
_

  
"Looking for your precious Torch, Potter?" Voldemort asked quietly. Harry's head snapped around. The intricate wand was now being held by Harry's archrival pointing directly between Harry's eyes.   
  


  
"Yes, in fact, I was," Harry smiled weakly. "Thanks for finding it for me."   
  


  
"I don't think I will return it that soon. I'm afraid it's my turn to have a little fun with you now."   
  


  
"That is exactly what I was afraid of."   
  


  
"But let's start by killing off each of your friends one by one. . . ."   
  


  
"You wouldn't dare," Harry growled. He narrowed his eyes. Voldemort merely smiled and pointed the wand at Luna.   
  


  
"_Avada Kedavra!_"   
  


  
"LUNA! NO!" Harry cried hoarsely. He tried to run to her, but found his feet stuck to the floor. "FUCK! FUCK THIS!"   
  


  
He knew it was too late. Luna was dead before she hit the ground. Harry could find no other emotion but hatred toward the evil bastard who insisted on making his life so miserable. He grabbed his ankles tightly with his hands and began to think to himself, "FINITE INCANTATEM! FINITE INCANTATEM!"   
  


  
Miraculously, he felt his feet move again. Wandless magic was a talent that he just barely had. It was easier to use in times of crisis. But he had only one thought on his mind; to kill.   
  


  
He lunged, taking the Dark Lord by surprise. Harry wrestled the Torch out of the Dark Lord's grasp. Pointing it at his adversary's throat, he muttered the last words Voldemort would ever hear.   
  


  
"Avada Kedavra, you bastard."   
  
  


**~ End Prologue ~******


	2. Chapter 1 The Beginning of Their Troubl...

***~Not Quite A Victory~***

Alright, here I am, back once more. **The Amazing Snorkack** is back in action, baby! But it's been months since I started Not Quite A Victory; this may affect the course of the fic. Well, time to sit back and see what kind of weird writing I've created after months of HP-free living.

Also, I have absolutely no idea whether Luna is alive or dead yet, she hasn't shown her face but it appears she's alive as of this chapter. So we'll find out, maybe the Boy-Who-Lived was too deranged to remember correctly... heheheheh.

*readers die of shock/prolonged waiting*

And heeeeeeeeere we go!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

**~ Chapter 1 ~**

**~ The Beginning of Their Troubles ~**

"Have you ever had the feeling that he hasn't been telling us everything?"

Of course. I've seen it in his dulled eyes, in his slouching posture. The haunting expression that could turn someone to stone. Nobody could have endured anything quite like it, and he has the right not to tell us everything.

"You haven't? It's pretty obvious."

But at the same time, he knows something that could affect others. Innocent wizarding families that are oblivious to these new dangers in this golden age will be in grave peril. We all thought that the bad stuff was past us, that we could finally live our lives openly, perhaps even reveal ourselves to the Muggle world, but it is not to be.

"Look, there must be something we can do. Do you think he's talked to anyone besides us at all? We must be the only two people he's been speaking to since graduation, and for us it's rare at that!"

I don't know what's wrong with him. Nobody does. A few straight-to-the-point writers of the Daily Prophet call him mad. He hasn't ever told them off; maybe he doesn't care, maybe it's true and he wants everyone to know. He lives alone, no pets, no visitors...

"He's got no friends, that's what it is."

"Don't be ridiculous, Ron," Hermione scoffed. "We're his friends. Remus is his friend. Even that nutcase Luna is his friend."

"I call 'em like I see 'em, love." Ron winked at Hermione. He was sitting in an armchair in the living room of their quaint house. Beyond them was an expansive window overlooking the small English town they lived above, their house perched high on a hill. They'd been married for two years now, but with their past, they couldn't think of having children... yet.

She rolled her eyes. Both were supposedly on vacation from their jobs; they were high up in the Ministry of Magic, but also in the less-renowned Order of the Phoenix. Their holiday mission was a very important and confusing one entrusted only to the closest friends of Mr. Harry Potter.

"Let's get down to business. We're the closest people to Harry. We've known him from the beginning of school, we've watched as he –"

"Began to mentally deteriorate into a funny farm candidate?" Ron butted in hopefully.

"NO! He is not insane! In fact, it could be us that are the insane ones and he the sane! Now shut up so I can think."

"But... you've seen him twitching before, haven't you? The twitching always makes me nervous. Really creepy-looking, if you ask me."

Hermione responded with a poisonous glare, and Ron snapped his jaw shut.

"As I was saying before, we've watched his entire life at school. He's told us just about everything."

"Just about. You say that like you're serious about it."

She continued despite the interjection. "But then there was that one night when he disappeared. Nobody had a clue where he went. It turns out the Chamber of Secrets held more secrets than we thought; that's what we're supposed to find out. What went on down there that unhinged the most stable of all of us? What did he bring back?"

She leaned forward in her chair, to really give Ron a good stare. "What did he bring back with him?"

"That stick, the torch-thing. Not much to it."

"Well, we'll start there. Where's the biggest magical library known to wizardkind?"

They both paused for a moment and thought, then answered at the same time.

"Hogwarts!"

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It was dark.

Well, any idiot could see that. Although the absence of light meant sight was impossible under those conditions. Bringing everything back to the darkness all over again.

It was wet.

His shoes were soaked. The bottom of his robes had been trailing in the dirty water for at least an hour. What he wanted right then was a good, hot shower. And a lobotomy to go with it.

It had all led up until these moments. Agonizing fear as he walked through large rounded archways and slightly luminescent moss growing from the cracks in the stone walls. It was the school's only chance of not being completely destroyed, and as usual, the responsibility to save it fell on him.

"Life is just getting better and better," he whispered sourly, running his hands along the wall to feel for the turns. He actually had no idea why whispering was necessary, but he did it anyway. All the same, there couldn't possibly be anyone here.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Ron paced back and forth behind Hermione with a quill and parchment. Her eyes darted back and forth furiously as she read the last page of a giant tome. With a depressed sigh, she slammed the book shut, dust rising from the pages. Another fruitless try.

Ron looked flabbergasted. He waved the empty piece of paper at her. "You've pored over at least a hundred books, and you haven't found one bloody thing?"

Hermione rubbed her forehead with the back of her hands, elbows propped up on the table. "Not even anything pertaining to the Chamber of Secrets!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. How do we know this has to do with the Chamber of Secrets?"

"Well, that's where Harry said he'd gone. He told us, after they calmed him down. I believe him; he wasn't quite the supposed 'nutcase' he is now, at least, that's what I think." She drummed her fingers on the tabletop, trying to make connections at lightning speed in her brain. Lightning, like Harry's scar. The scar that was above his eyes. Emerald eyes, like the –

Like the torch's flame.

"That's it!"

Ron stopped striding and gave her an odd look. "What's what?"

"Oh, why didn't I realize it before! It's so obvious now!"

"What's obvious?"

Ignoring Ron's confusion, she continued, in a burst of speech, to explain what she had just begun to realize.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Harry Potter was insane.

It wasn't an all-out, psychotic ranting kind of insane. It was more subtle, more... inward. If you hadn't met him before, insane would be the last word you would use to describe him. Either he could mask it quite well or he was totally unaware of it, but since nobody knew what he knew, the answer would remain a total mystery to his baffled friends and acquaintances.

Here was the dead giveaway: the incessant tics. Twitching, unbearable to watch, as though it were a contagious illness that was spawned of eye contact. It was an unconscious reaction to the Cruciatus Curse that had done his mind in years ago, but nobody was clever enough to make the connection, except maybe Harry. And that was only if he cared to delve his mind into the past, which was not often, and mostly ended in a fit of blind rage that cost him some good furniture. He preferred his furniture intact, if possible.

As for his looks, he'd barely changed since the incident. Still short, still with the same messy black hair that never stayed flat (though who would care? It's not like anyone visited any more), the same scar that cut jaggedly across his forehead as a lifetime branding, and his haunted, sardonic expression almost genuinely the one he'd had at the final showdown. What had really changed were his eyes.

Eyes can tell you a lot about a person. The look in someone's eye, the amount of focus, the position of the eyelid over the eye, all a clever body language. Even Harry's eyes once held a feature that could be called innocence, a "twinkle" that alerted people to his good nature and selflessness.

Innocence was for saps. Harry had no incorruptible purity left. He was warped and altered beyond hope by circumstances that would kill most people. He was no longer a child obeyed someone else's rules; he made the rules.

And boy, did he love making the rules.

Most of the time it was simple. If he felt like moving all the rooms in his house around, then he did. It was trickier around other people, the few times he was in the presence of good friends during the basically uneventful life he chose to have. He'd tweak their minds, slowly but surely, and convince them of something preposterous. The modification of a recent memory, a slight adjustment to a well-known bit of information; that whole thing. It was easy and sadistic, and a way to practice the strange powers of telepathy he'd never noticed before recently.

The last time he'd done it, he secretly convinced Tonks that she could fly without the aid of magic. It took the others almost an hour to convince her to come down from the roof of Harry's hose, and the entire time he'd chuckled at their suspicions that she was drunk. It was so simple to undo what he'd done that he wondered if he should tell them all about this new ability to touch and control the world around him with only his mind. But they wouldn't understand if he tried, he knew.

It was strange things like this that let him know he was insane. It was irrational that something like that could happen. Every day he tried to use the power, making sure it hadn't faded away. It would be useful to probe other peoples' minds and discover everything they thought was safe in their skull. Any sort of blackmail was always comforting to have, because you'd never know if you needed it.

It was this telekinetic power that convinced him he could pull it off.

**~ End Chapter 1 ~**

**Responses, Responses...******

Mella deRanged ~ Rest assured, there will be no Harry/Luna. It's a nice ship, but it doesn't work in this scenario.

Charliepotter ~ Well surprise, here's chapter one! Hope it makes sense. It should in the end. I wish I could finish my fanfiction, I feel so stupid that I start them and can't seem to finish them...

PrincessEilonwy ~ Yeh, no swear words. And about the reviews, I set the amount to 40 for the other two fanfictions because frankly if there's no reader interest and comments, then it shouldn't be top priority. I know I sound stupid, but I value reader input, it helps shape my stories.

Pyrinsomniac ~ Thanks! Battles are cool.


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